Belsidus, Dr. Dr. Belsidus was created by George Schuyler (Dr. Cranfield, Walter Crummel, Sadiu Mattchu, Gail Reddick, Dick Welland) and appeared in “The Black Internationale” (Courier, Nov. 1936-July 1937) and “Black Empire” (Courier, Oct. 1937-Apr 1938). Dr. Belsidus was originally a humble man from the Muni River Settlements in “Spanish Guinea” (now Equatorial Guinea) who was noticed by a colonial official and sent to school in Spain. While working at an aircraft factory in Barcelona, making airplane engines, Belsidus was recruited into the Black Internationale, a secret global organization of black professionals dedicated to throwing whites out of Africa. Belsidus becomes their leader. For them he creates a technologically-advanced air force (led by a fetching aviatrix, Patricia Givens), and with the help of SCIENCE! of his own creation, including death rays, solar power, and hydroponics, Belsidus and the Black Internationale invade Africa and drive Whitey out. Some may call Belsidus mad, but he disagrees:
“My son, all great schemes appear mad in the beginning. Christians, Communists, Fascists and Nazis were at first called scary. Success made them sane. With brains, courage and wealth even the most fantastic scheme can become a reality. I have dedicated my life, Slater, to destroying white world supremacy. My ideal and objective is very frankly to cast down Caucasians and elevate the colored people in their places. I plan to do this by every means within my power. I intend to stop at nothing, Slater, whether right or wrong. Right is success. Wrong is failure. I will not fail because I am ruthless. Those who fail are them men who get sentimental, who weaken, who balk at a little bloodshed. Such vermin deserve to fail. Every great movement the world has ever seen has collapsed because it grew weak. I shall never become weak, nor shall I ever tolerate weakness around me. Weakness means failure, Slater, and I do not intend to fail.”
George Schuyler is one of the few pulp writers known to be African-American. (As was the case with the dime novel writers before them, so many of the pulp writers are so little known that there may well be a number of women and POC writers among them–we just don’t know anything about them). An interesting man, Schuyler, a journalist and social commentator who was hardly a leftist–and, to be truthful, wrote The Black Empire parodically rather than as a serious example of racial wish fulfillment fiction–who nonetheless wrote speculative fiction that appealed hugely to the left as well as to the right. The Black Empire is just one of six works of Schuyler’s that has an entry in my Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes–he wrote imaginative fiction when he chose to, speculative fiction that spoke to the African-American reading audience in ways that, perhaps, pulp science fiction did not. (To be fair, Astounding Science Fiction, one of the perhaps the standard-bearer for Golden Age science fiction, sold well in black neighborhoods, including Harlem and Chicago’s South Side, but it was in the general pulps rather than the science fiction pulps that POC would have seen recognizable faces).